I arrived at FMX on Saturday and they told me everybody has left...sorry about it-couldn't make it on early Friday. But I think there will come another chance to meet.

I always felt to be stressed out at festivals, but as a surprise, this time this feeling didn't arise. The films in competition I saw were interesting, seen under technical aspects they were perfect, imo their stories rather a small matter and with no risk.
The film I liked most was "Posledny Autobus"(Last Bus) (extract: http://vimeo.com/36540922) which wasn't actual animated. It looked like they x-ed a couple of frames here and there, so that it looked like stop motion. It's a real-life film with human actors who have to wear animal-heads. But I liked the story which was unique, also the music did match and was giving more depths to the film (but you can't tell from the trailer).

It was also interesting to watch films of Georges Schwizgebel who was in competition but also showed a collection of his work and one film he liked (Flying Nansen). All in all the films gave me a dichotomous impression, mostly because I couldn't see much progress in his work, it looked to me like he had developed a style which he is mostly repeating again and again. Unfortunately there was only a small audience for his retrospective and his interviewer was really lame, cold and incurious.

The festival (and FMX) is located nearby the central station, you can reach everything via pedes easily, some nice coffee bar to meet people always around, the hotel (Motel One) was comfortable.

I see that Posledny Autobus won the Grand Prize. If this is the case, I hope there was an uproar among the present animators. What's next, a category of shop window arrangements? A category of student Graffiti? Will newbie animators, asking for the live action button, soon be popping up on these pages?

Exactly. I was just reading about them and none of them strike me as seasoned craftsmen (not a single woman, right?) -- lots of theoreticians with credits for teaching and writing and camera work and dance choreography and some directing -- not your usual jury pick for such a specialized festival.

Well, that was only the Animated Com Jury - the main jury were http://www.itfs.de/en/home/competitions ... mpetition/ quite some other people. Neverthelesse it strikes me odd that such a non-animated film (it wasn't even pixillated, but merely sped up acting) got the main price.

Stuttgart is a bit "special" in that it's a city of medium-sized businessmen and workers for that Über company Daimler-Benz. They have culture because they can buy it, and the festival has lots of sponsors because then they can show up and drink champagne amongst artists and other strange folk. It's not really a "grown" festival, and, from my personal experience, certainly not one which cares much about the artists. Even Annecy seemed to be more animators-friendly despite its glitzy venue (but I was there in the 90's, it might have changed).